I been thinking about reddit..

submitted by andrewblanchard from (self.whatever)

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[–]thefirststone 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

No, but they do have more bots.

[–]andrewblanchard[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Is there any reliable way to tell when I am chatting a bot?

Maybe there is a way to confuse or trip up or checkmate a bit?

Any ideas?

[–]thefirststone 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

In theory, bots won't be able to react to the simplest of tangential references, personal questions, or anything which can't be completed by the simplest markov bot.

In practice, all responses on reddit are so obtuse that I can't tell if I'm dealing with a similacrum or somebody who's so deep in their own head that they can't converse normally. The only reason I'm sure that some reddit users aren't bots is that I've seen the brain-dead text that passes as conversation on related Discord channels.

There comes a point where substantive discourse itself is shunned, and reddit hit that point a few years ago. You ask a simple question, eager for information, and you're moderated to oblivion -- sometimes banned. There is no simple way to explain this. It's beyond parody, beyond moderation faults. They are tweaking their algorithm so that biological humans can not participate. If it's true there, it's true for Twitter and Facebook, I imagine.

[–]andrewblanchard[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I believe that the purpose of all this is like you said it is to create a situation where normal people cannot join into the conversation thank you for your very nice response

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Wouldn't Discord be prime real estate for that, but maybe operated in a more advanced way? Couldn't they program something that just went off of initial argument points made by the individual and then just repackage the comments according to trigger words, only managing bits of conversation in person on occasion to keep the program updated with new content? I don't know much about Discord, so if this is a retarded thought just let me know.

[–]thefirststone 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Good point. I figured it was just age, since the older group that moved off IRC remained more or less comprehensible. But that's the only one I know with real people that lasted more than a few months.

The chat bots wouldn't even need to be very advanced to do the crude needling and contextless anime and superhero picture posting, either. It's less cogent chat than you find on 4chan threads, which itself is widely thought to be botted for political purposes.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Discord is riddled with autistic teens/adults with the attention span of canned soup, so some might be real. Animeposting is probably spillover from 4chan culture, so it could make a bot look more believable if it's just tossed out there too. 4chan is a hotbed for bot and shill activity though. I don't know how often you've frequented there, or if so for how long, but the content has tanked in quality for a while now. /sci/ is nearly unusable for the most part, and you can tell by the sheer number of vax slide threads how bad things are. Whether controlled by useful idiots, shills, letter agencies, or even bots-- I couldn't imagine anywhere where communication online is involved would be unadulterated anymore. It's extremely depressing.